I admit I can be a bit of a food snob sometimes. Not too much, because I’m too cheap to eat at fancy restaurants, and because when I’m lazy it’s easier to pop some pizza rolls in the oven. But I’m from New Orleans, and that means loving good food. And loving good food means you have to hate the bad stuff. But there’s one area of snobbery I simply condemn outright. And that, my friends, is wine snobbery. I dislike alcohol snobbery in general, but some types I can at least sympathize with. I totally understand not liking cheap American beer—I find most of it drinkable, but some is just disgusting.* But I’m hardly a beer snob—I usually just stick with something from Abita since drinking it makes me feel like a good New Orleanian. And the high-end beer snobs are really just as bad as the wine snobs. And maybe connoisseurs of scotch or brandy or whatever notice a difference among various brands, but I’m not much of a hard liquor kind of guy, except for vodka, and if you think it makes a difference what kind of vodka you drink, you’re a moron.**
But wine snobbery is perhaps the most well-established and thus most annoying type of booze snootiness. They obsess over notes of fruit and oak, of aftertastes and aromas, of terroir and other French words. They buy fancy wine from Napa or Spain or Italy, they buy special refrigerators just to keep their wine, they talk about it at cocktail parties with other snobs just like them. And sure, some wines taste better than others. Maybe more expensive wines taste better, at least on average–or maybe it’s just another example of the price-placebo effect. This article notes several examples of the price-placebo effect. One of those examples involved a team of scientists from Stanford and Caltech who served identical bottles of wine to groups of volunteers, while telling them one cost $90 per bottle and the other cost $10. Guess which one the volunteers rated more highly? The $90 wine. In the absence of other factors, people assume the more expensive item is better. Or consider this report from NPR. MIT did a scientific test of a supposed new pain medication, and told one group of volunteers that the medicine cost $2.50 a pill and told the others that it cost 10 cents a pill. And, of course, the people who thought they were taking a pricier pill felt more relief, even though both groups were merely taking a placebo. Similarly, a recent Consumer Reports article compared store-brand and name-brand groceries, and in the majority of cases, the products were of nearly equal quality, even though the store brands cost 27% less on average. Tests like these show that a higher price doesn’t always mean better quality, but the wine snobs in their sheep-like state just keep wasting their money.
And besides, let’s assume for a minute that pricier booze tastes better (this applies whether we’re talking about well-aged liquors or fancy-schmancy French wine or microbrewed beer only six people have heard of). It tastes better? That’s missing the entire point of drinking alcohol! The point of drinking alcohol is to get drunk, or at least to get a decent buzz going! If you want to drink something that tastes good, have a Coke or a Barq’s Root Beer, or maybe a nice cold pint of chocolate milk. No alcoholic beverage is going to taste as good as any of those things. If we didn’t get drunk from alcohol, we’d never drink it! Yes, sometimes the bare bones absolute cheapest booze you can find is so dreadful you can’t even drink it. But if something fairly cheap is palatable, why waste your money on the super-pricy stuff? Remember why you drink.
* For example, I absolutely cannot stand Miller Lite. Oddly enough, though, Miller High Life is probably my favorite of the big-name cheap American brews. Go figure.
**Unless you drink it straight, in which case I guess you possibly could tell some differences, but why would you want to do that?
Disclaimer: This blog does not condone or encourage underage drinking or excessive alcohol consumption. Always use a designated driver. Don’t do anything stupid.
Wow. So many things are wrong with this post. First off, in the first paragraph, you admit to being one of those hippy hipsters who thinks you’re cool because you drink one of those brands “only six people have heard of” (which you later condemn). Just because you don’t drink that much (which, knowing you, I can justly assume), doesn’t mean that those who enjoy beer and liquor (I would think I’m one of them) can’t differentiate the good from the bad from the ugly.
Then you cite these articles. I read all of them. I’m not sure if you ever took an advanced economics course in which you might learn about controls and robust results, but the “tests” run in the articles are completely baseless. You can’t just ask someone whether a $10 or $90 bottle of wine tastes better. Though I drink, I hate wine. If someone like me who does not drink wine is included in this test, of course they’d adhere to the price-placebo effect. You ought to control for experienced drinnkers. If, however, you chose these articles because they were run by MIT and CIT, then I guess you adhered to the universityname-placebo effect.
Finally, you say the only reason to drink is to get drunk (or buzzed). Wow. This is how, even if I didn’t know you, I’d know you’re not an experienced drinker. High school sophomores say moronic things like that. Drink a Coke or Barq’s with a burger or steak rather than an ice cold beer (and no, not your pathetically predictable New Orleanian Abita)? That’s ridiculous. Or, after a long night in the library or in the office, take it easy with a glass of NICE whiskey, scotch, etc.? There’s no better way. And it is certainly not because you get drunk.
Bottom line: stick to writing what you know. I admit I don’t know wine, but you don’t know alcohol.